Abstract
The essay highlights versions of the spiritual body in seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry. In discussing poems on the prenatal condition of the soul, its postmortal life, and its bodily communication with the divine in the present, it shows, against the background of classical positions and in the context of contemporary discourse, how the philosophical concept is unfolded, refigured and thereby rendered a subject of experience in the here and now. Since the notion of the ochema is itself structured metaphorically, placing body and soul in a relationship of mutual correspondence, metaphysical conceits appear particularly adequate to its presentation. Thus, by imagining the soul as body and the body as soul, the texts expose and reflect the inherently poetic structure of the ochema.